With the take-over of Arik Air by Asset Management Corporation (AMCON) on Thursday last week, there must be legions out there ready to swear that the airline’s cup was not only full but running over. Indeed, only those extremely unfamiliar with the creeping regulatory, operational and commercial issues that the airline had to square up to in the last quarter of 2016 in particular could have missed the whiff of a somewhat inevitable regulatory action.
Was Arik guilty as charged? The statement by the undertakers –AMCON leaves no one in doubt about their believe that Arik deserves to roast in the furnace: “For some time now, the airline, which carries about 55% of the load in the country, has been going through difficult times that are attributable to its bad corporate governance, erratic operational challenges, inability to pay staff salaries and heavy debt burden among other issues, which led to the call for authorities in the country to intervene before Arik goes under like many before it”.
It didn’t end there: “The move, which clearly underscores government’s decision to instill sanity in the nation’s aviation sector has also prevented a major catastrophe that would among other factors protect, and preserve Arik Airlines as a going concern. The development will afford Arik Airlines, which is the largest local carrier to go back to regular and undisrupted operations, avoid job losses, protect investors and stakeholder funds as well as ensure safety and stability in the already challenged aviation sector. The airline would now be managed by Capt. Roy Ukpebo Ilegbodu, a veteran aviation expert under the receivership of Mr. Oluseye Opasanya, SAN.”
Let’s look a bit more closely at the particulars. December 20, last year, the workers went on strike over unpaid wages, non-unionization and non-remittance of pensions and other statutory deductions. To end the picketing, the regulator, NCAA had to be called in. In a communiqué later signed by representatives of Arik Air, the aviation industry unions – NAAPE, ATSSSAN and NUATE, and NCAA, the airline agreed to pay the outstanding wages in addition to addressing all of the issues that led to the strike including a review of the circumstances of all laid-off employees. True to its culture of impunity, it reneged.
Before then, the airline had been locked in tango over non-carriage of passengers’ baggage and other sundry infractions of regulations involving its London to Lagos flights between December 2 and December 4, 2016. Again, NCAA was forced to slam a hefty sanction of N6 million (a separate compensation of $150 was to be paid to each of its passengers whose baggage was delayed) on December 22. Now, if these events were to be one-off, one would have nursed the hope that the airline would at some point put its acts together by showing some modest improvement. However, rather than address the problems, the airline appeared to have slipped further down the operational abyss the consequence of which was the siege by customers on its counters across the federation over poor customer services in January this year.
In the circumstance of the symptoms appearing more like those of a terminally diseased enterprise, the rather drastic pill by AMCON would seem appropriate.
But then, a more sympathetic look would reveal an airline deserving of more understanding, if not support. I have often wondered how a local airline like Arik can ever imagine that they have a chance in an environment of fierce competition and nary government support. Imagine an airline whose ticket sales are in naira forced to undertake a disproportionate amount of its operations – from basic spares to C and D checks all in foreign currencies; and this when access to forex is not only prohibitive but expensive, and where loans are in double digits. This is where those making a song of corporate governance are yet to tell us, how, like the Avatar of the Christian faith, they expect the board and management of Arik air to turn water to Jet A1!
What do I find wrong with the takeover? Nothing, except that the advertised intention is often time a far cry from the real thing. Casting the proverbial first stone is only AMCON’s first step in the feast of sleaze. You can bet on the corporation releasing mind-boggling corporate infractions in the coming days as Nigerians get set to come to terms with what is potentially controversial corporate takeover of all time.
For now, the N300 billion hole, said to be in the books of banks alleged by AMCON will probably do. Oh yes, that if true, would no doubt take a sector already certified ailing further down the pit. But then, that is AMCON’s words against Arik’s. As for governance issues highlighted by AMCON justifying the takeover, that aside being hardly new, is the same plague suffered by our corporates – public and private – including no less an entity such as AMCON whose record of sale of assets has remained as opaque as the purveyors of the toxic assets!
And the wages palaver? Aren’t all – from state government to some departments of the federal government – sinners who have come short in the courts of the Nigerian worker?
Would the new managers perform magic? Only if they have an untrammeled access to Emefiele’s vaults in the Central Bank of Nigeria. For Hadi Sirika, the aviation minister, it is probably another job in a day after the fiasco of closing down Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja for routine maintenance.
Again, you ask – what do I find irksome about the take-over? Simple: first is the astounding barefaced impunity of the Nigerian corporate elite in their clinical execution of corporate heist; the second is that the exercise is not meant to solve anything. More worrisome however is the growing charge that the exercise is somewhat ethnic-driven. I hope I am wrong on the latter.
Perhaps I need to be more pointed here: Arik Air, in succumbing fatally to the Nigerian atrophy, may be guilty as hell; the point is – are the scavengers now looming over the carcass of the once promising airline any better? Have the same sharks revived Aero Contractors years after taking over?
How bizarre can things get? Imagine an Ado Sanusi, who until Wednesday last week was the Deputy Managing Director of Arik Air now suddenly catapulted into Aero Contractors Airline as Managing Director? The individual, who only 24 hours before had announced the intention of Arik to challenge the take-over! As reward for good services rendered to who and to what end?
Far for shedding a tear for Arumeni Ikhide, the erstwhile chairman of Arik Air, my tears would rather go to the luckless country being raped in such broad daylight.
Category: Tuesday
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No tears for Arik Air
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In Trumpsylvania
It’s been only two weeks. Just two weeks. But what an amazing two weeks! And I hear some people – a lot of people, actually, but what does it really matter? Oh, by the way, look around you, isn’t it a lovely crowd we’ve got in here today? Absolutely gorgeous, I tell you. And there are far more people outside waiting to get in, but the police and the fire officials will not let them.
Ours is a movement. The biggest, largest, widest, deepest, hottest movement the world has ever seen. Period. And it was right there for everyone to see at our Inauguration. Whether you faced north, south, east or west, the crowds stretched as far as the eye could see.
I have never seen so large a crowd in my life. It is the largest ever to attend any Inauguration, going back to 18 — or whenever they had the first one.
And yet the lying media. So totally dishonest. The lying media said the crowd at Obama’s first inauguration was three times as large. Can you believe that? This lying media will go to any length to denigrate the American people who voted for us. They will do anything to delegitimise us. The lying media
Well, they don’t have a monopoly on facts. For every so-called fact they come up with, we are ready with our alternative fact. And from what our alternative-facts people are telling me. And they have looked into the matter with amazing thoroughness. Absolute thoroughness, I am telling you. And they are the best in the business, believe me.
From what they are telling me, the crowd at the Donald Trump Inauguration was larger than the crowd at the first and second Obama inaugurations combined. I have never seen such dishonest people in my life as the lying media. Shame on the lying media. CNN, are you there with your fake news?
One more thing, the ‘intelligence’ community. What ‘intelligence’? These are the same people who led us into a war that was an absolute disaster. I mean absolute disaster. They told us Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. There were no such weapons.
And now they claim that, based on their so-called intelligence, it was Russia that hacked into the Democrat National Committee’s computers to help Donald Trump win the election. On the basis of that bogus claim. Anyone with half a brain can see that the claim is bogus. Completely bogus.
Yet on the basis of that claim one jaded columnist who parades a so-called Nobel Prize in economics. I tell you, it would have been more appropriate if they had given him the prize for fiction.
I think I know why they didn’t. The guy can’t even write good fiction. Or fiction of any kind. This guy calls us the Trump-Putin Administration. That’s the kind of hooey that passes for intellectualism in the failing New York Times these days. It is pathetic. Absolutely tragic.
I have never met Putin. Or maybe I have. The hacking could have been done by Russia. Or may be China. Or a 400-lb guy at some computer terminal somewhere. The important thing is that we won the election handsomely.
If three million illegal aliens. Our people now tell me that it is more like five million people. Whatever the number. All of them. Every one of them voted for Hillary. If they had not done so, I would have crushed her on the popular ballot as well. And that’s the honest truth.
And look at my Cabinet. Look at the amazing set of people I have brought together to help me run Washington. Combined net worth of more than $12 billion. Terrific people. Authentic Americans in every sense. They will put America first, America second and America third. America now. America always. America all the time.
People who will never apologise for America. Never. People who will make America great again. Isn’t that amazing?
And there are more such people out there. Many more. One great example is this guy Frederick Douglass who has been doing some absolutely terrific things lately in the African American community. He still might get a place in my Cabinet, this Douglass guy. You never know.
The people who ran Washington aground. These people who prospered at the expense of the people in the heartland of America. Those who created the American carnage. We have put them on notice that they have had their time.
Those who reduced our great industrial base to rusted factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape. They erected an education system guzzling zillions of dollars only to produce students deprived of all knowledge. I mean, all knowledge. It is an absolute disgrace.
And those inner cities where you couldn’t walk down the street without getting shot. Chicago, I give you fair warning. If you don’t fix all that mayhem, I will send the Feds to do the job. We are going to rebuild our inner cities totally. All those drugs and gangs. And talking of jobs – all those jobs that China and Mexico have stolen from America, We will bring back the jobs. And our rusted cities will come alive again.
And the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no more.
We’ve been in Washington only three weeks and they are saying they’ve never had a more dizzying time in their lives. Absolutely head-spinning dizzy, from what some of my people out there are telling me. And that’s because, for as long as they can remember, Washington has been all talk and no action.
They all go to Washington vowing to shake up the place. But instead, Washington sucks them in. It shakes them up so completely they don’t know whether they are going or coming.
That is the Washington they know, the Washington of old. The Washington that protected itself and celebrated when struggling families had nothing to celebrate. We have transferred power from that Washington back to the American people. To where it belongs. And that’s where it will stay. Period.
America will start winning again. Winning big-time. Winning like never before.
We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth. And we will bring back our dreams. And prosperity. And optimism. And patriotism. We will bring back torture.
We will build new roads. And highways. And walkways. And biking routes. And hiking trails. And bridges. And airports. And tunnels. And railways all across our wonderful nation. We will build the wall. And Mexico will pay for it.
Politicians who are all talk and no action — constantly complaining but never doing anything about it. The time for empty talk is over. Now arrives the hour of action.
All those who have been marching here and elsewhere, where were they when the election was going on? And those challenging my Executive Order revoking American visas of nationals of seven predominantly Muslim countries for a maximum of 120 days in the first instance.
I say to them that we have the right to determine whom we allow into our country. And we concede the same right to every country.
There are bad people out there. Radical Islamists and terrorists. We have to keep them out to protect Americans. Those countries that don’t like what we have done are free to take them in.
A so-called federal judge on the West Coast. Seattle, or whatever. Where else will you find such a judge, except on the East Coast. New York. Those coastal elites. This so-called federal judge essentially takes law-enforcement from our country. An order carried out smoothly in our country and across the world. It is totally ridiculous. And it will be overturned.
Even a so-called federal judge, why would the judge halt a Homeland Security travel ban backed by my Executive Order? It’s a terrible decision. Absolutely terrible. It will open the gates for very bad and dangerous people.
We have to keep evil out of our country. People who will unleash death and destruction. The whole world is in trouble, but we are going to fix it.
That’s what I do. I fix things.
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Death and the sick countrymen
You are right – this headline is a parody of Death and the King’s Horseman, the Wole Soyinka classic, specially cited in his Nobel Prize for Literature win.
If you link this parody to yet another WS play, Madmen and Specialists, you might just chafe at the madness that has seized the Nigerian populace, in the rash orchestration of the “death” of a man alive but taciturn; by the voluble that claim life but, by their spiteful conduct, are dead and rotten.
Just as you ask in that ultra-dark play, Madmen, who is the madman and who is the specialist, you begin to wonder, in this morbid fever: who is the dead and who is the living!
Indeed, another WS great, The Man Died, his Civil War prison memoirs, holds the clincher: the man dies in them, that cannot arrest their beastly id!
The Buhari death wish is, therefore, the philosophical death of those who somewhat wish their nemesis would vanish — some Greek classical drama-like deus-ex-machina, come to spring them from the dire comeuppance of their past crimes!
Well, long may they endure their well-earned anguish! No matter the dark plots of anyone, only God, the Almighty, gives life; and only he, can decree when one’s time is up. And he is not, it appears, about to serve as their deus!
But pray, what is the hubbub over the purported death of a 74-year old? That his sun is setting at noon, though he lives into young old age, given the Biblical term of three-score-and-ten?
That he is one of the irredeemably corrupt, selfish and venal he is sacrificing his old age to battle, so that younger Nigerians would have a future?
Or that he has made his peace with corruption, like the Nigerian client priests of sleaze, who now bait catastrophe by goading their congregation to free murder, to trigger faith and ethnic chaos, a potent but satanic device to divert attention from a dire ethical crisis, and retain the old corrupt order?
Only in Nigeria — where the most vulnerable, are also the most gullible, and therefore, the most voluble, in pushing their own destruction!
Which explains why the madness is less with the vicious few, mainly ultra-corrupt elements, that have a serious axe to grind with President Muhammadu Buhari and his government.
Acute and strategic lots, those! Indeed, life for Buhari is sure death for their nefariousness, outside of which they have no life! So, these vile elements would cook up just anything, no matter how absurd, to survive.
You can, therefore, understand the grand folly of the virulent robots that amplify the evil agenda of the well-oiled corrupt machine, even if yelping from temporary pains, from a rotten order being put right. But whoever gains without pains?
How did we get to this terrible pass, which merrily canonizes the vile as saints but demonizes the righteous as devils?
Col. Azubike Nass, an Enugu-based retired army officer, offers an apt Biblical parallel. That dream in Biblical Egypt, in which seven lean cows swallowed seven fat ones. That decoded, translated to seven years of boom, preceding seven years of bust.
However, unlike Pharaoh that deliberately stored grains during the bumper years, for the lean and agonizing years, Nigeria blew everything as if there wouldn’t be tomorrow. Despite his huffing and puffing, the profligacy started under President Olusegun Obasanjo. By the time Goodluck Jonathan happened on the presidency, the last of the family silver was up for pawn!
But just as there was a manic seller in President Jonathan and his crowd, there were no less crazed buyers in unconscionable Nigerians, spanning the religious (dis)order, the media, the traditional institutions, the judiciary and other equal-opportunity hustlers, that always think actions have no consequences.
That explains the 2015 election-time bazaar, by a president more than desperate for re-election, and was cocky he had enough cash to splash.
But even with this open secret, of an old order sacking the collective till, just to sate the insatiable greed of its partisans, why is there so much uproar in the street, so much so that not a few romanticize sheer anarchy, just because there is no quick fix?
It is tough, you must admit, when the pocket hurts. Reason scampers before irrational rage. A hungry man, after all, is an angry man.Still, at the expense of a more secure and less corrupt future?
That echoes another Biblical parallel: in the post-Red Sea wilderness, between Egypt and Canaan, the Promised Land, the stiff-necked Israelites barked at Jehovah to either divine instant el-dorado, or pronto, return them to old slavery in Egypt!
So, what is the present rumble aimed at? To return Nigeria to post-2015 era, where the common wealth, as could be seen from the many ongoing cases of alleged sleaze, was conquered treasure of a few? And then after, what?
Turn the clock back to 1984, the first coming of this same Muhammadu Buhari, as military ruler. To be sure, that government was high on impunity (more than any military government before it); and had a quaint idea of mechanical “discipline”, in the whip-coerced queues its War Against Indiscipline (WAI) programme decreed.
But what came after it? The Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha era. The one liberalized corruption and democratized poverty. The other was epitome of the head of state as an irredeemable thief!
The cumulative destruction of that era, birthed Obasanjo’s delusion of grandeur, Umaru Yar’Adua’s tragic power captivity and Jonathan, as Nigeria’s unsympathetic undertaker, led to the meltdown that made the Buhari second coming inevitable.
Pray, is Nigeria fated to moving round in futile circles?Still, the Buhari Presidency must accept fulsome blame for its own self-crucifixion. How can a government, ranged against virulent enemies, wilfully refuse to beam what it is doing, in a time of excruciating pains, which calls for citizen understanding, empathy and support?
This bizarre stand has handed its enemies the knife to slaughter it at will, and the tar to demonize it, to their heart’s content.
Make no mistake: a casual foray into the social media shows a sizeable number of genuinely disillusioned citizens. But very many too would appear paid hacks, hired to cook fake news, fan hideous hate, float silly rumours and give the most innocuous of policies the most bizarre of slants.
Viciously turning the social media into an anti-social tool appears a well-funded billion-naira business! As for the traditional media, the most hysterical may well be those refusing to admit the era of free money is gone!
That racket may be a journey to nowhere. But it won’t abate, unless the government mounts a vigorous and well-funded counter-campaign: hope against its enemies’ agenda of hopelessness, love against virulent hate, facts against diabolic rumours, and a systematic and deliberate projection of its accomplishments, to silence the nay orchestra, now making hay.
That is Buhari’s only way out of the present self-crucifixion.
Meanwhile, those who killed themselves, by the hate of wishing others dead, had better wake up from the dead!
It is a national emergency. Every life is needed for salvage. -
2Face: Why they rage
“Dear Nigerians, after due consultations, it has become clear that the #OneVoiceNigeria protest scheduled to hold in Lagos and Abuja on Monday the 6th of February is under serious threat of hijack by interests not aligned with our ideals. The point I am intent on making is that is (sic) not worth the life of any Nigerian. It is in fact motivated by the need to negotiate a better deal for the ordinary Nigerian. I therefore announce the cancellation of the planned protest. We would share further information in due course. We appreciate the massive support. I am convinced that our voices have been heard… ”
That was Innocent Tuface Idibia, in a short video to announce the cancellation of his highly publicised march on Saturday night. Yours truly obviously saw it coming. It takes an appreciation of the massive psychological operation (psych-ops) deployed against the leading light of the march in the past week alone to see why the event stood to chance of being held. Indeed, it is a miracle that the man still had the presence of mind to prepare what is evidently a hastily prepared visual to the public.
As for the trophy for the abortion of the legitimate protest, that deservedly goes to Fatai Owoseni – the Lagos top cop who insisted that the constitution and the law counted for little when it comes to his idea of law and order. To him, what the constitution and the law guarantee are only as far as the old discredited colonial-style law enforcement template would allow.
To him, it was sufficient that no official request came from the protesters notifying security agencies of their plan; moreover, he would add that intelligence report indicated that criminals might hijack the process to foment trouble. And so in Owoseni’s book, individuals or group of persons who may wish to embark on civil demonstration should inform the police until adequate security can be arranged for them!
To imagine that this is the individual in charge of policing the home of dissent – the acclaimed Centre of Excellence, a fast transforming mega-city; not only does it leave little imagination about his suitability for the challenge but raises serious questions about his understanding of role of the police institution in a modern, democratic state!
Should one also talk of the chief law officer of the federation who would rather be missing in action where contestations about issues of law and justice crop up? What about the Pontius Pilate presidency that would go on to speak from both sides of the mouth at a time the rights of citizens are being trampled under?
I perfectly understand the pains of the Buharists for whom the Tuface capitulation merely presented ample occasion to gloat, and settle scores: “A man who did not protest against music Piracy that is affecting his business and did not protest against the massive corruption in his home state did not look to me as a man will balls to lead any other form of protest. He was given the go ahead by the Vice President and the Police but you can’t protest over nothing.”
That was the message of Anasieze Donatus, in an interview with Premium Times. Tayo Ayano, speaking to the same medium was just as blunt: “Tuface should start from his wife’s state, Akwa Ibom where the ‘uncommon governor’ practically stole his people blind and then move to Delta State where they celebrate thieves and common criminals.”
To those who insist on Tuface being an unlikely saint and so stand disqualified on the roll of those that could cast the proverbial stone, I would argue that he never sought to cast himself in that role. To the best of my knowledge, what he sought to do was merely galvanise like minds to engage the government on the raging issues of the day; the very issues that define our existence such as being echoed in bars and street corners.
These are the untamed cost of living that have left most households pauperised; the collapse of industries, of the national currency; the unprecedented below par performance of Buhari’s ministers in the face of the dire emergency, the continuing meltdown in state institutions and the apparent lack of direction all of which have bred despair in the polity.
The problem, it appears, is that a high flier has chosen to lead the charge in seeking to articulate the very issues that agitate Nigerians daily.
In aborting the protests, the federal government may have spared itself the embarrassing spectacle of watching the hordes of angry, frustrated Nigerians rant to no end about its supreme incompetence before a global audience in the age of the new media; that no way diminishes the tragedy of that botched outing nor the weight of their undelivered message.
However, let’s even assume that the government is able to put down the resurgent culture of civil protests – which seems increasing doubtful in the age of the new media – what about the problems of governance created by its own inertia that is at the heart of the distrust and ill-will? Would these also be decreed out of existence?
Now that the messenger is at least temporarily out of the way, the question is – what becomes of the message? Put it another way: why do the people rage? Why the anger?
The answer is not hard to hazard: not in our recent history have we seen an administration utterly lacking both in direction and cohesion. But then, that itself is an understatement. How do you describe a government which after bungling the budgetary process shops for alibis? A government that has made such a mess of its Mid-Term Expenditure Framework that the National Assembly could not but sneer at what it described as its sophomoric effort? Imagine an administration laying a $30 billion loan request before parliament with no specific projects attached to the request? How bad can things get? And considering how bad things are, where is the sense of emergency?
Think of members of the nation’s Economic Management Team – the monetary and fiscal monetary authorities –working at cross purposes with each other. Only in Nigeria can this be contemplated –at a time of dire emergency!
Where are the strategies to get our industries revving back to life? Where are the strategic plans to wean our industries off their dependence on imported raw materials and hence foreign exchange in the medium term? In short, where are the clear-sighted, forward-looking strategies to get the nation out of the current challenges other than the same old, tired ideas that brought us to this point?
Left to pick between #IstandwithBuhari and #IstandwithNigeria, the choice should be obvious.
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Back to the typewriter
The typewriter is coming back, but not as a sentimental archaism.
It is coming back as a means of holding on to a modicum of privacy, the very notion of which has almost been eviscerated in this technetronic era.
Nothing is off the radar anymore. Not state secrets – remember WikiLeaks. Not financial transactions designed to conceal illegal or questionable wealth – remember the Panama Papers. Not even the transactions you make with your credit card. Nor your band deposit. Ask those Yahoo boys.
Not military secrets with the highest security classification. Remember the Danish teenage who, from the basement of his parents’ home in Copenhagen, hacked into the computers of the North American Aerospace Defence Command, whose mission is to safeguard the sovereign airspace of the United States and Canada.
No communication routed through computers is private, or safe. Not email. Ask Hillary Clinton. Her presidential campaign was sunk in large part by her predilection for using email through a private server. From an abundance of caution her husband Bill does not use email. Neither does Donald Trump. Better to put your message in an envelope and have someone deliver it to the addressee the old-fashioned way, he has cautioned.
Just two weeks ago, the BBC – yes, the BBC, far and away the best and most reliable broadcast outfit in the world – had to apologise for reporting that Donald Trump had been shot and wounded during his Inauguration. A hacker had embedded the false report in its computer system.
You can encrypt your message in the most esoteric way conceivable. Some enterprising hacker is lurking somewhere to decrypt it, for fun or profit.
That is the context in which the typewriter, especially the manual type, is making a comeback.
It does only what you ask it to do. No intruder can monitor your strokes or cause what you are typing to bob up on a computer screen half a world away. It does not spy on you. It keeps no record of your keyboarding, and it cannot be coaxed to yield such records. It does not distract you nor lure you into inappropriate material. Rather, it concentrates your mind and attention on the job at hand.
It is durable, built to last, not fabricated in the era of planned obsolescence. It will restore the music and the rhythm lost in the newsrooms at peak production time when dozens of sturdy manual typewriters clacked away at different speeds and struck different chords — music and rhythm that got the adrenalin of the typical newspaperman flowing. You knew that serious work was going on in there.
Today, the newsroom is almost like a graveyard. It is full of people all right, people pecking away at their laptops or staring at their display terminals editing copy or designing content, but you do not get the sense that they are actually working. Noiseless work doesn’t quite cut it.
Best of all, the manual typewriter requires no electricity.
But it has its downsides.
Sorting out stuff in a room that had for all practical purposes served as a dump, I chanced upon the old Hermes manual typewriter that had served me through graduate school, and on which I had composed the first draft of my doctoral dissertation.
It was not my first typewriter, also a Hermes, which made up in sturdiness what it lacked in streamlined elegance. It was on it that I had learned how to type without looking at the keyboard, aided by the instructional manual Typing Made Easy, in 26 easy-to-follow chapters.
I disinterred my find and carried it upstairs.
“What’s that?” one of the boys asked.
“A typewriter,” I replied.
“What does it do?”
“It types stuff, like a word processor,” I replied, without much thought.
“Where is the screen?”
There is no screen as such. You insert copy paper into a diaphragm in the carriage, and secure it by pressing a lever. Then you turn a roller back and forth to position the paper, and you are ready to start typing.
“Where is the erase button?”
“There is none.”
“How then do you correct errors or make changes?”
“You touch up the material you want to ease with liquid paper from a bottle that must be kept tightly closed when not in use, allow it to dry, and then type your material over it.”
“How do you transpose sentences or paragraphs or pages?”
“You don’t. You can’t.”
“How do you vary the type font?”
“You can’t. It’s the same for every job.”
“So, you can’t italicise key terms or do fancy stuff?”
“No.”
“How can you tell how many words you have typed? Or how many pages?”
“You count them.”
“How do you go about centering material on a page?”
“You centre the carriage, the component that shifts one space at a time to the left as you type. Count the number of letters and spaces in the material you want to centre. With your carriage at the centre, backspace once for every two spaces you counted. Then type your material. It should stand at the centre of the page, with equal space to the right and to the left.”
His disdain was palpable, but he was not about to give up.
“There is no cursor. So how do you know you are close to the right-hand margin?”
“A bell rings. And then you pull a lever toward you to move the carriage back to start another line of writing.”
“How do you save or retrieve your material?”
“You can’t, unless you made a copy.”
“How do you make copies?
“To produce one original and three copies, you place carbon paper, glossy surface down, between each sheet of paper, and proceed as you would if typing just one copy.”
“What is carbon paper?”
At that point, I gave up.
Let us face it, in terms of convenience and reprography, the manual typewriter is not the best tool. For most people, the relative privacy it affords will hardly compensate for its sheer messiness. However, with some modifications, it just might be the ideal writing machine for individuals and institutions engaged in highly secret work; hence the renewed interest in it across the world.
I am thinking of a battery or solar-powered typewriter that will have some of the elements of the word processor but without the intrusiveness of the electronic computer. It will have two or three interchangeable fonts, some capacity for transposing material and for making crisp copies, a word and page counter, a replacement for that pesky ink ribbon, and a less cumbersome process of erasing and centering material.
If design and instrument engineers reading this piece are minded to embark on producing a proto-type, I hope they will acknowledge that they got the inspiration from this column. More crucially, they should seek out the author and offer him valuable consideration for his insights.
Meanwhile, don’t throw away that old clunky typewriter yet. You might need it to safeguard the privacy of your communications, or to put up for sale when a boom market in that durable machine develops.
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When the state is on AWOL
Until last week, few Nigerians outside the mainstream Pentecostal Christian establishment could claim to have heard of Apostle Suleiman Johnson let alone his Auchi, Edo State -based Omega Fire Ministries Worldwide. Not anymore. Give it to infinite capacity of the nation’s security establishment to mismanage any cause no matter how worthy or well-intentioned, the man has suddenly become an issue – and now hero of sorts to some people – no thanks to last week’s bungled arrest by the Department of State Security Service (DSS). AS it is, what should ordinarily have been a routine invitation extended to a citizen to clarify an alleged felony has suddenly become a big issue now tearing at the nation’s socio-political fabric.
For aside the new low which the embarrassing episode represents for an agency that ordinarily prides itself as the bastion of ruthless efficiency; the rumble it has generated has, to the extent that it has drawn the service into the vortex of the ethno-religious maelstrom currently rocking the foundations of the country, has suddenly thrust it into the centre of the raging inferno.
It is of course the Ekiti Governor, Ayodele Fayose that we must thank not just for daring (yet again) to strip the service of the aura underlying its assumed invincibility but going as far as revealing its majestic impotence like his PDP-brother governor Nyesom Wike did on October 8 last year when he spectacularly fobbed off officials of the Department of State Security when the latter staged a mid-night raid on the residence of Justice Abdullahi Liman of the Federal High Court, Port Harcourt. For while the gubernatorial delinquencies exhibited in the two instances, which although represent a clear affront to the rule of law and the very notion of orderly society has remained unchallenged, it is the continuing emergence of the mutant forms of the same disease that amplifies the problem of a state in free, unarrested, fall.
By now, most Nigerians must have either watched or heard about the Johnson Suleiman video. Needless to state that the seduction to mindless murder is galling as it is offensive to my Christian sensibilities just as it is antithetical to everything that the faith stands for. Never mind the latter-day rationalisations by official of the church which are no more than futile attempts to smoothen the edges of the open and undisguised incitement to felony. What must be alarming to the rational mind is the open license to murder as well as the opportunistic exploitation of the carnage in Southern Kaduna to further stoke embers of violence by a presumably influential cleric.
In the circumstance, the invitation of the cleric by the DSS is certainly justifiable; not so however is the mid-night siege on his hotel room in the Ekiti State capital and the accompanying drama. Indeed, while the Suleiman episode and the brouhaha it has generated merely evinces the tragedy of the state in mortal decline; a state where influential actors seek exceptions from the rules governing the collective, the specious rationalisation by those insisting on making a non-existent distinction between what they consider in the particular instance as the lesser crime of incitement to murder and the actual crime is not only unhelpful but disingenuous.
Isn’t that the reason different provisions and hence punishments exist for different grades of crime?
But then, that is only one half of the picture of the duplicitous state– now best exemplifies in the Southern Kaduna mayhem. For a federal government that has been pathetic in its response to the carnage just as the security agencies have fallen miserably short in confronting the real daemons, the Suleiman episode merely presents a good alibi for inaction. Suleiman therefore, could well be guilty as charged for what is at best a crime of indiscretion – although he is most probably, no more guilty than a certain Nasir el-Rufai who is on record to have handed hefty cash payments to some Fulani herdsmen in appeasement to stop their murderous activities.
Has the DSS requested el-Rufai’s cooperation in identifying the fellows who received the largesse from him? How does one explain why a DSS which continues to live in denial – suddenly elevating the more minor issues like those of Suleiman over and above the weightier issues of murder and mayhem allegedly being daily perpetrated by the bloodthirsty Fulani herdsmen under the very noses of the intelligence community? Is it that the perpetrators are not only invisible but invincible?
By the way, does anyone still remember Saleh Bayeri, the Interim National Secretary of Gan Allah Fulani Association who sensationally told Premium Times that the Agatu bloody conflict of February 2016 was a reprisal attack by his people against the Agatus who he accused of killing, in 2013, a prominent Fulani man – Ardo Madaki? Here are his exact words as reported by Premium Times in March 2016: “This action (the death of Ardo Madaki – that is) reverberated across all Fulani people in the whole of West Africa and the clamour for revenge began to grow strong. He comes from a very well respected clan and the Agatu sent the Fulani a chilling message with his murder”.
By the way, the Agatu, he claimed, also killed over 300 of his people “but because we don’t have people in government or the media, no one said anything when genocide was being carried out against our people”.
Really?
Does this justify the revenge – the sacking of an entire community and this in a modern state with all the apparatus of law enforcement? Talk about an admission of crime and the motive; would the whiff of crime, even of a mere accessory to mass murder, pass for a lesser crime in the circumstance in which the Agatu massacres took place? Did the DSS ever take Bayeri in for questioning in the face of the grave admission? So why would the supporters of Suleiman not ask for similar exemption?
All of these are of course possible in a state in retreat – a state that has long surrendered the monopoly of arms to a rampaging militia of herdsmen; one that has equally lost its rationale as the guarantor of justice and public order. It is sadly a case of – what you see is what you get! In other words, Messrs Suleiman and Bayeri are merely the obverse sides of the same coin of Acquired Impunity Disorder Syndrome (AIDS) of a wilting state.
Expect more huffing and puffing in the coming days – until another excitable topic breaks – to herald another cycle of talk. -
The priest, the governor and the state
The furore, over an Auchi, Edo State, priest’s latest fatwa on Fulani herdsmen, appears the latest excitement in a tense polity.
Apostle Johnson Suleiman, in a video gone viral on cyberspace, had told his cheering Omega Fire Ministries Worldwide audience to “kill” any Fulani herdsmen they found lurking around his church premises.
He claimed the new fatwa was contingent on a telephone intelligence that some “Fulani herdsmen” were after his life, based on his principled stance on the southern Kaduna crisis.
Now, southern Kaduna is a tale of blood and gore, of hideous mayhem, all pressed in the alleged mass massacre of local Christians, by an alleged Muslim cabal, allegedly supported by the powers-that-be.
Though there appears no “smoking guns” regarding official complicity, a vibrant rumour mill, projecting ancient but mutual animosities, magnified by equally bitter media allies, has given the allegation an ugly life of its own.
That manoeuvre has created two opposing armies of fearsome hate, arrayed in ethnic, religious and regional battalions, sworn to dooming each other in fierce verbal combat — or much worse! Pray, in matters of faith and perceived ethnic slur, who indeed keeps his head?
Not the good apostle, he of the incendiary pulpit! Apostle Suleiman would appear the classical neophyte, ready to risk all in defence of his adopted faith.
After sentencing poor Kaduna Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, to a “divine” death sentence, for the temerity to attempt controlling religious fanaticism, Muslim or Christian, in his state, the crusading Apostle and fiery Holy Michael of besieged Christendom Nigeria, also feels obliged to christen El-Rufai “the short man devil that calls himself governor”, in the final flurry en route to proclaiming his latest Fulani fatwa!
Why? Perhaps because the good Lord still gives the governor life, while the angry man of God had proclaimed him dead!
Still, let it not be supposed that the opposing Muslim partisans, for whom the much hated “Fulani herdsmen” are nothing but scary faces of gargoyle, are angels, meek and innocent. Far from it.
For too long, Islam has, in the North, been projected as the swashbuckling faith of power, before which other adherents must bow and cow. That has, over the years, come with soulless impunity, which has chiselled away at citizens’ most fundamental of rights — the right to life.
By commission or omission, you could routinely get away with murder, only if you killed in the name of Allah — never mind that that was convenient screen for base bigotry against citizens of other faiths; or even sundry criminality. That has resulted, in the victims’ camp, in bitterness and dissonance.
But, in the great theatres of this war, like southern Kaduna, with its chequered history, the battle would appear on two fronts. While the victims count their losses in lives and limbs, the aggressor class are savaged with wholesale demonization, by the media, sympathetic to the victims.
That, with time, becomes received wisdom — or, more accurately, received folly — as every Fulani is no devil any more than others are saints.
That is the sentiment of explosive resent that super-sympathizers, like Apostle Suleiman, tap into — perfectly understandable, given the extant atmosphere of mutual and vibrant hate.
Still, crusading for the cheated is one thing. Goading congregants to free murder, under whatever guise, is another.
That was the point, it would appear, the man of God entered the Department of State Services (DSS) radar.
But even before dealing with state intervention in the matter, on what plank, secular or divine, might Apostle Suleiman stand, on charging his church members to kill other citizens?
On his Christian creed? Even at the point of arrest and subsequent crucifixion, the last miracle of Jesus, the Christ, did was restoring a cropped ear — a big blow for non-violence, no matter the provocation.
If you plead the Mosaic law of “an ear for an ear”, could the Apostle then be practising Judaism in Christian garb? Or is it that Christ was too divine, to be relevant in this era of cocky impunity by the hateful Fulani?
In the secular world, is the Citizen Apostle simply rooting for self-help, despite the apparent danger to himself and his flock? If he was, what sort of citizen might he be?
Of course, the reported DSS attempt to arrest Suleiman added even a more grotesque twist to the ridiculous drama, of a man of God baying for blood.
Enter, Ekiti’s Peter Ayodele Fayose, the perfect example of a gubernatorial burlesque, if ever there was one.
Somewhat, the much hated “Fulani herdsmen” are drawing Christian clerics, spanning the good, the bad and the ugly, to the Fayose burlesque.
At Yuletide 2016, Fayose drew fulsome, if impolitic, praise from The Redeemed Church of God’s Pastor Enoch Adeboye, provoking a raft of reactions, for or against.
Fayose’s unscripted citation, on that grand occasion, was his heroics against killer “Fulani herdsmen” — admittedly one of the few good policies the excitable governor can boast, applying due process to a clear and present danger.
Less than a month after, again relating to “Fulani herdsmen”, Fayose was rushing to save an apostolic loose cannon from DSS arrest!
Again, on what plank might the governor stand, embarking on such outlawry?
That, a governor, sworn to keeping the law, can foil other organs of state, doing their work? Or that the creed of a governor installed by law, on due process, is to push for self-help, over and above due process, using his exalted office as abused collateral?
And just imagine, the putative collateral damage in Nigeria’s pseudo-federalism, when the governor, though chief security officer, doesn’t have any of the state security arms under his control? And just suppose, a crazy trooper, just tired at a governor standing on his official dignity, each time they try to do their work, and cocks a gun — or worse!
Bedlam in the human rights chamber, now as quiet as the grave yard?
Let neither the outlaw priest nor the outlaw governor test the will of the law. Both are assured of nothing but doom, whatever fancies colourful emotions conjure.Emmanuel Olaniran Oladesu, PhD
A prophet is not without honour, states the Bible, except in his own country, among his own people. Not here! Ripples today celebrates Dr. Emmanuel Oladesu, the humble and unassuming Political Editor of The Nation, who just earned a PhD in Psychology of Education, from the University of Lagos.Kudos to the newly certified man of learning and character who, by the way, nearly missed secondary education for lack of means. It’s the stuff inspiring tales are made. Welcome, the latest scholar in Nigeria’s newsroom!
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Inflation: A lexical theory
This is as good a time as any to revisit a hypothesis I first laid out several decades ago, most likely in a column for The Guardian.
Back then, inflation was running at a brisk pace that no one dared mention for fear of being charged with a crime against National Security or banished to Gashua, in the remote Northeast of Nigeria, the unlikeliest candidate then for host to a federal university. Ask the venerable Professor TS David-West.
But the rate of inflation could not have been lower than what obtains today – 18. 5 per cent, most likely understated. The “settlement culture” was flourishing as never before, especially in the wake of the “June 12” crisis, and the Mint was sent into overdrive to churn out the lolly.
The political terrain was saturated with cash, and the Central Bank knew better than to even create the illusion that it was mopping up excess liquidity; doing so would have subverted the settlement culture undergirded by national policy.
Today, ever so often, the Central Bank steps in to sell treasury bonds and take other measures to curb excess liquidity and thus tame inflation. Yet, despite the CBN’s exertions, that pesky metric stands at a disconcerting 18.5 per cent.
With this background, I can now proceed to the hypothesis I adumbrated several decades ago. I called it the literary theory of inflation. In retrospect, I have re-christened it the lexical theory of inflation.
Now, according to the best authorities, inflation is the rate at which the general level of prices of goods and services is rising and, consequently, the purchasing power of currency is falling.
That seems to be the condition of the Nigerian economy today. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence for it. Two close relations tell me that within a week of taking out N100, 000 from the bank, it is all gone, with little to show for it. They tell me they have to make an inventory of their purchases and spending just to convince themselves that they had not been chiseled out of the money by a pick-pocket or a shopkeeper.
How those who earn the minimum wage of N18,000 a month – which many state governments say they cannot pay, and have in any case not paid for six months running – how such people live from one day to the next must be one of the nation’s best-kept secrets.
At this point, the reader must be wondering: What has lexis got to do with inflation?
Lexical inflation, as I operationalise it in this submission, is the rate at which the idiom, the vocabulary of public discourse is billowing, consequently eroding the power and meaning of language.
My lexical theory of inflation holds that, in a given setting, all things being equal, the lexical inflation varies directly as the rate of inflation in the general economy. In other words, as the general level of prices for goods and services increases, the idiom, the grammar of public discourse balloons, leading to the degradation of language.
This formulation does not pretend to the rigour, the tight coherence of those social science theories that have stood the test of time. I hope an accomplished scholar, or at the very least, an ambitious graduate student desirous of earning a place in the world of learning, will judge it worthy of further enquiry and systematic explication.
For now, it is sufficient to call attention to some examples which appear to validate the theory, proceeding from a longitudinal perspective.
Remember that time when, according to General Yakubu Gowon, money was not a problem but how to spend it? The Udoji salary bonanza backdated one full year tested the absorptive capacity of Nigerian economy as never before, or since. A friend of mine quipped then that money was not his problem all right, but how to find it. On the whole, however, it was money, money, money everywhere.
In the inflationary spiral set off by the bonanza, goods and services became more expensive. Lexical inflation developed to match it, in keeping with my theory.
It was no longer sufficient to run a firm or a company. It had to be a group of companies, even if both operated from the same cramped store front. In short order, the “group of companies” was supplanted by the “group of industries.”
One example from that era clings in my memory: The Abulu Group of Industries. You had to be visually impaired not to see its huge signboard on the facade of a two-storey building on Ikorodu Road, between Jibowu and Palmgrove in Lagos. Its line of business was not stated. But you stood in awe at the facility housing not just one industry but several industries, and of course, the self-effacing owner.
It was beneath one’s dignity to answer to the title of manager. To count for somebody, you had to be a chairman, or a managing director, or both. And you could, for good measure, add a third: chief operating officer.
Every large building became, first, a Complex, and then an Ultra-modern Complex. Being a federal permanent secretary was no longer a sufficient distinction. You had to be a super-permanent secretary.
There was this Lagos barber who owned a shop on Ojuelegba and another in Lawanson. He ran them on alternate days, taking a break on Sundays. On account of that arrangement, his business card introduced him with touching modesty as managing director of a Barbers’ Group. A more discriminating person would have named the arrangement The Capillary and Tonsorial Artists’ Group.
Now, fast-forward to the present.
There was a time when newspapers were content to have political editors, sports editors, features editors, business editors, science editors, and literary editors. Not anymore. To keep pace with the rampant inflation in the economy, the media have had to engage in some lexical inflation of their own.
The staffer formerly known as the political editor has since been re-designated “group political editor” His or her colleagues on the other specialty desks have profited from the same lexical inflation.
Every hamlet in Nigeria is now a “kingdom,” over which a king or “monarch” rules dutifully, with a panoply of princes and princesses and king mothers and queen mothers and lesser royals. When the monarch was just a paramount chief, he was content with the title “His Highness.” As lexical inflation gathered pace, he became His Royal Highness.
But that too is now passé. To be considered a significant monarch, you must have His Majesty prefixed to your name. But even that does not secure your status, since there just may be some majesties who are not royals. So, better to insist on “His Royal Majesty.”
But why settle for that when you can take on the lexically formidable title of “His Imperial Majesty”?
Nigerian politicians have always felt that there was something not merely inchoate but frankly belittling in being called a State Governor. Nor do they accept that the prefix “His Excellency” truly reflects their status. After all, ordinary career ambassadors are also entitled to the prefix.
So, to make the title reflect the gravity of the office, they insist on being called “Executive Governors.” Senators do not want to be mistaken for members of the House of Representatives who are merely honourable; you have to call them “distinguished” even if most of them are distinguished only for being distinguished, like those of whom it has been said that they are famous only for being famous.
A final thought: My theory holds, remember, that lexical inflation varies directly as the currency inflation in a given setting, all things being equal. Consequently, when they pad the Budget remorselessly, they are preparing the ground for the kind of lexical inflation we have never experienced.
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Sheikh Prof. Alhaji Dr. Tragic Mimic
How about these two for comic comparison: Sheik Prof. Alhaji Dr. Yahya Abdul-Aziz Awal Jemus Junkung Naasiru Deen Jammeh Babili Mansa and Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga?
Babili Mansa, Wa Za Banga – some bathetic end-rimes?
And all that “pleasure”, after a dig at some fictive comic names? Dead wrong!
Rather, it is a living nightmare of comic power plays, bordering on a recurring ancestral curse, plaguing political Africa.
Needless to say, those comic plays have tragic consequences – and it is no comfort that they seem rooted in the African power gene!
Mobutu Sese Seko (1930-1997), was the Zairean dictator who roasted his country and seared his people on the cruel altar of un-sated personal greed. He belonged to the Cold War era.
Though he lived for just 67 years (he ruled Zaire, now Democratic Republic of Congo, for 32 of those years), he was a millennial contagion.
DR Congo still wilts from that contagion, passing, as power toy, from “Papa Doc” Laurent Kabila (1997-2001) to “Baby Doc” Joseph Kabila (2001 till date, even if his legal term has expired).
Mobutu is dead. But Mobutu’s power spirit is alive and well. Long live the Mobutu pestilence!
Born simply Joseph-Desire Mobutu, at the zenith of his power lunacy, Mobutu had flared into Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga!
His Cold War era tragic co-comics included Jean Bedel Bokassa (Central African Republic, who, at the nadir of his power debauchery, renamed CAR Central African Empire, and crowned himself “emperor”); and Alhaji (Dr.) Idi Amin Dada, Conqueror of the British Empire (CBE), the Ugandan power psychopath and savage.
You would have thought all that tragic comedy had been interred with the Cold War (1947-1991), with its insane capitalist-communist ideological posturing, until Jammeh, the Gambian tragic mimic, bobbed up.
Like Mobutu, he happened on the scene, as a pathetic soldier.
The scrawny, dark-goggled Lt. Yahya Jammeh, when he ousted the long ruling President Dauda Jawara in 1994, was the perfect portrait of the angry and hungry African soldier – angry at his parlous state but hungry for insane political power.
By 1996, the scrawny soldier, of two years ago, had begun his pseudo-democratic rebranding. As he rebranded on the “democratic front”, so did he rebrand on the wardrobe flank.
His Spartan military fatigue gave way to over-sized white agbada, complete with a bogus “tesbir” (the Muslim chaplet) and a comic sword.
The Babili Mansa (Mandika for “Bridge Builder” or “Conqueror of the River”, whichever one you find more exotic!) must project his pristine Africanness, with his devout Islamic faith!
A power dummy never got more effectively sold! Jammeh, the hungry soldier of 1994, had become Jammeh the Munificent in 2017; so cocky he could first concede an election with consummate grace, then change his mind at the ease with which you bat an eyelid, and finally tempt ultimate disgrace by essaying the election’s outright annulment, ala Nigeria’s Ibrahim Babangida of 1993!
Despite his puny country, and even punier defence forces, he was deluded enough to think there won’t be consequences! All thanks to ECOWAS, the African Union (AU) and the United Nations, however, he got rudely woken from his costly reverie!
By the evening of January 20, His Excellency, Sheik Prof. Alhaji Dr. Yahya Abdul-Aziz Awal Jemus Junkung Naasiru Deen Jammeh Babili Mansa had joined Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, in the African hall of power infamy, where they both nestle (Mobutu dead, Jammeh alive) in the dustbin of history!
It’s unclear, though, how long Jammeh would survive his arid post-power years. It took Mobutu only three months to expire, though he was 67 and had a running battle with prostate cancer.
Jammeh is 51, rippling with robust health. He might yet endure decades of exile, languishing in his self-imposed wilderness!
Neither is it clear how much, after 22 years in power, of the Jammeh contagion is left in the Gambian body politics.
But before anyone gets drunk on anti-Jammeh triumphalism, and in the chest-thumping swagger of the moment, forgets the flow of history, let it be made clear: Jammeh’s electoral crime is no worse than Gen. Babangida’s, against the 12 June 1993 presidential mandate of Basorun Moshood Abiola (God bless his soul!).
The ECOWAS that now flexed fearsome muscles, and barked bone-chilling orders at poor, deluded Jammeh, was as gentle as a lamb.
Even at a stage, when Babangida had long been consumed by his own plot, and Sani Abacha was ogling self-transmutation to “elected president” to sustain the criminal annulment, Bill Clinton, the US president and leader of the so-called free world, thought aloud that might not be a bad idea!
So, what has changed now? Was it a function of no precedence (as indeed, the Jammeh peaceful ouster is yet another one, after the Laurent Gbagbo misadventure in Cote d’Ivoire)? Or Nigeria was just a misbehaving giant, not ECOWAS, not AU, not UN could touch?
Still, Jammeh’s resolute ouster, to press the inviolability of democratic mandates, cannot be a bad thing, despite Nigeria’s criminal behaviour of 1993.
But whoever is involved in this laudable Gambia intervention should have the presence of mind to know they just doomed any power looney that might want to play the Jammeh card in the future. Better to buy into a noble convention than fret at the fate of putative power rogues!
Nevertheless, history has a way of pulling a fast one, with the most dramatic of ironies!
Exactly the same day, almost to the hour, one comic was being prised off the tiny Gambia, another comic was being installed over the mighty United States.
Between Yahya Jammeh and Donald Trump, there is little to choose, if the subject is democratic ideals. The one refused to concede an election in which he had been thoroughly licked. The other thundered he wouldn’t accept any result that didn’t declare him winner!
So, despite Uncle Sam’s much-vaunted power and glory, Americans’ bragging right as leaders of the “free world”, The Gambia as a laggard among countries on the globe and Gambians as (un?)willing victims of Jammeh’s power megalomania, Trump and Jammeh are pretty much democracy heretics.
The big difference is Trump won his bluff; and Jammeh lost his.
But that is just as well, and it might be cold comfort. But it appears Africa just lost its monopoly of churning out power clowns – and new US President Trump is glittering evidence! -
Osinbajo: From Davos with love
To the legion that has been unrelenting in their clamour for a coherent economic policy, the federal government, it appears, seems finally set to give them something to chew upon. A newly-developed Economic Recovery Growth Plan designed to take the country out of recession, says Vice President Yemi Osinbajo at a Business Interaction Group on Nigeria attended by foreign investors in Davos, Switzerland last week, is in the offing.
While the details of the plan will have to wait till its launch date in February, of interest is that the Vice President, perhaps following in the tradition of his boss – President Muhammadu Buhari, seems to prefer a so-called high profile international forum to let Nigerians into its plans to address what is essentially a structural domestic economic challenge. Again, while I have no problem with the high-octane affair and the photo-op that Davos presented to our officials, it seems easy to discern an effort which, in playing up to the tradition of a leadership obsessed with Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and its hordes of portfolio investors, typically lapses into the usual cant at a time the world has learnt to see and treat us as a joke!
So what is the problem with the Economic Recovery Growth Plan (EGRP)? First is the fact that the plan is coming 20 months late. Never mind the implicit admission of lack of a holistic working plan by the Buhari administration, its coming at this time would appear to have finally validated the claim of the administration’s critics that it lacked a blueprint to tackle the challenges facing the economy.
Second is the content of the plan. Admittedly, we can only speculate at this stage. Nonetheless, it is interesting to hear Vice President Osinbajo speak of the administration’s modest efforts at redirecting the national budget in favour of capital spend. As against previous years when capital estimates hovered around 16 percent, the administration has quite admirably been able to push capital expenditure (capex) to 30 percent – if you call that an achievement in a country with unprecedented infrastructural gap. Imagine that under the 30-year roadmap infrastructure development plan – the Integrated Infrastructure Master Plan (NIIMP), it is said that Nigeria would require at least $2 trillion (N398.1 trillion) over the course of the next three decades. Again, the vice-president spoke of federal government’s plans to utilise the nation’s pension funds to finance infrastructure in the country, the Social Investment Programme under which N500bn has again been proposed for this year in addition to last year’s. These planned infrastructure spend, will no doubt, go a long way to reflate the economy and also in unlock the nation’s socio-economic potentials.
But then, what we need now are bold and if you may – radical thinking out of the current morass. Not the old, worn ideas for an economy in trauma.
In other words, while the above measures may prove helpful somewhat, they may just end up as placebos for the simple reason of the many plagues being inflicted on the economy by a cartel of disparate, unpatriotic actors whose business consists essentially in manipulating everything from its institutions to the national currency for their selfish reasons.
Elsewhere, I have written about predatory behaviours of financial sector operatives. What else is there to say of the usurious class known to reap where they have not sown? What about their spectacular preference for questionable financial derivatives that are no more than Ponzi schemes and other unconscionable activities that render them as laws unto themselves?
Today, I wish to take on their allies – the players in the forex market – for the obvious reason of being such a pain in the nation’s ass! Of course you know the story: the naira, our currency, is currently worth a little more than tissue paper! On Friday, a unit of the greenback reportedly sold for N490! That is supposed to be the market-determined rate being pushed by agents of foreign capitals in our midst!
Of course, I understand that the scarcity of forex occasioned by the dip in global oil prices at a time of uncurbed demand would translate to the pressure on the naira. At a time everything – from fuel, consumables spares and raw materials – are imported, this would ordinarily seem inevitable. What we do know however is that the current run on the national currency is sustained by a cartel of rogue players in the official segment of the forex market in alliance with the shadowy players in the parallel market. The problem is that while their destructive activities on the economy have long been established, very little is being done by the federal government to take them on.
I ask: what will it take to wrest the country from the firm grip of these manipulators? Is any thinking going on in this regard?
Now to the perennially weeping club – the nation’s club of manufacturers. While I do not mean to be uncharitable, I have often wondered if truly the country has a manufacturing class to boast of. As it appears, what we have is a bunch of players permanently hung on forex. Never mind that some of the so-called established manufacturing companies have operated here for decades, the truth is that they do not earn, talk less of covering their forex needs from their operations. Imagine for instance, that to produce margarine, we are still being told that the companies would require forex to bring in palm oil from Malaysia! None, it appears, have found sense in backward integration nor shown willingness to explore its assumed benefits. Of course, so long as oil flowed, there will be enough forex to go round! Now, it seems the party is over!
I once raised the issue of a petrochemical complex which I considered as central to a future industrial strategy. Again, has anyone in government yet figured its place in the industrial mix?
Talk about our industrial policies needing a rethink. Would Osinbajo’s ERGP fix the lacuna?
The greatest culprit of course is the prodigal federal government that spends 40 percent of its entire forex (something it cannot afford) to import fuel that it can refine locally. And now we are told by Vice President Osinbajo that we have to wait for Dangote to bail us out in 2019! For now, we can forget about pushing more aggressively for more refineries to come on board; fixing the ailing ones to augment the supply situation or even the much-hyped colocation of refineries. Who says better attention to those issues would not guarantee speedier recovery? Why are we so unblest?
